Everywhere you turn these days, it seems the majority of snapshots (and sometimes more serious photographic projects) are being taken with camera phones. That trend is not going to reverse anytime soon.This past weekend, months after my niece, Jen and her husband, Carl, eloped and got married in Las Vegas, the newlyweds threw a party. As you’d imagine, lots of pictures were taken; my quick and unscientific count showed a 7-to-1 ratio of phones to cameras (hence this blog’s title).

Last Thursday, David Pogue’s New York Times column, State of the Art, was headlined: Tiny Camera To Rival The Pros. Pogue may not make his living as a professional photographer, but he is a great writer, on-camera talent and interpreter of trends in technology. The object of his affection in this particular column is Sony’s new DSC-RX100, which he calls “the best pocket camera ever made.” Read the review for yourself and go on to look at the sample pictures.

I’ve been a big fan, and user, of the Canon G-series for a lot of years. My G11 delivers great images, some of which have gone to double-page spreads. The only thing that has kept me from acquiring the new Canon G1X is the loss of the same degree of macro capability I’ve been used to. But that’s a consequence of the vastly larger imaging chip in the G1X. Every feature seems to have its price. Somehow, according to David Pogue, the new Sony camera can focus from 2 inches. Coupled with a Zeiss f/1.8 lens, this may be the next big purchase.

Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal’s Weekend Edition did a feature on 50 summer essentials. Number 48, cited by Lucas Allen Buck, CEO and co-founder of the maker of Hipstamatic, is a vintage Argus C3 camera wrapped in wood.

If you have $1850, just go to: www.store.ilottvintage.com and beat Mr. Buck to the punch. Or, save a whole lot of money and send me $650 and I’ll send you my C3 (minus the wood, but still a very cool object). And if you do, I’ll get the new Sony camera for those times that my iPhone just won’t do.

I was really pleased recently to see a small article by Kevin Sintumuang in The Wall Street Journal that began this way – “Pre-Facebook, pre-Flickr, pre-You’ve Got Mail!, there was a simpler way of sharing photos: instant film.”

That sent me to my shelves of obsolete gear, where I retrieved the original Polaroid camera that my father had bought in the early 1950s. It’s the Model 80 Highlander. Taking it out of the original box brought back a lot of memories about just how revolutionary the Polaroid experience was. The original manual was still with the camera, and I’ve scanned some of the pages so you can get a feel for learning a new piece of technology in the years before a point-and-shoot camera came with 100+ pages of instructions. There’s a lot of information about old Polaroid models on the internet, and it’s interesting that with iPhone apps like Hipstamatic, there’s so much interest in taking the quality out of your pictures. Still, for two dollars or so, there’s no great harm done. I’ll probably do it myself.

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